The Path to AI Transformation

[Yunqi Insights] Models Are Getting Stronger, So Why Is Context Becoming More Valuable—Yunqi Conference 02At this year’s Yunqi Conference, Qoder made a point along these lines: Model power is a commodity. Context is the asset. It’s worth noting that this isn’t Qoder’s official slogan—it’s a directional insight shared during their session (vendor summary; original wording subject to the on-site presentation, so don’t read too much into it). But it captures an increasingly widespread trend: a...

[Yunqi Observations] Generation Rate Is a Vanity Metric — Yunqi Conference 02The most striking thing I took away from this year’s Yunqi Conference was a single slide from Alibaba’s CodeQoder: Generation rate is a vanity metric. This is the verbatim English line as relayed by the vendor. The original slide takes precedence; no over-interpretation is warranted. That said, it aligns with the direction I flagged in Section 7 of the previous Yunqi Observations post: as AI’s share of code generat...

The Hardest Problem in Enterprise AI May Be Incentives: Who Wants to Actually Use It?At the Cloud Congress this week, enterprise AI forums are heavy on technical discussion: how to integrate models, govern data, control permissions, deploy agents, manage cloud resources, audit security, and get enterprise knowledge into context. These are all real problems. But when a manufacturing case study came up, I found myself asking a different question: Why would people inside an enterprise actively u...

Stop Building Another AI Generator: Real Value Lies in Completing an Entire JobTwo things are happening simultaneously. On one side, at the Yunqi Conference, WonderClip showcased a complete pipeline: upload script → break down shots → prepare materials → batch generate. On the other side, single-point generation tools are increasingly struggling to command premium pricing. Model vendors are building generation capabilities directly into their native products, general-purpose agents are absorb...

Search Is Evolving from “Providing Answers” to “Completing Tasks”: What Comes After SEO?In my previous Yunqi conference field report, I laid out the three stages of search evolution using this trajectory: Query → Results → Question → Answer → Goal → Plan → Search → Reason → Search Again → Tool → Action → Verify. After publishing, the three questions clients asked most frequently were: What does this trajectory mean for existing content assets? How should SEO and GEO be repositioned? And what ...

From Coding Agents to Digital Workforce: AI Applications Are Converging on a Single System ArchitectureWalking through the Agent product booths at the Yunqi Summit, the most counterintuitive finding emerges: despite appearing across wildly different industries, they have all grown into the same underlying OS. Qoder powers software development, QwenWork handles knowledge work, TinyFish drives Web browsing, WonderClip enables video production, and OpenSearch powers search and research. Strip aw...

The Most Dangerous Thing About Attending Tech Conferences: Taking Someone Else’s Bet as Your AnswerOver the past few days at the Yunqi Conference, I wandered through countless booths and sat in on sessions covering QwenWork (Alibaba Cloud’s enterprise context platform), Qoder (Alibaba Cloud’s code generation assistant), WonderClip, Agentic Search, Enterprise AI, and more. I picked up plenty of technical insights—but the real value came from something else entirely: I realized one of the bigge...

Yunqi Conference Isn’t the Answer. It’s a Map of Where the AI Industry Is Betting.Walking the floor at this year’s Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Cloud’s annual flagship event in Hangzhou, the biggest takeaway wasn’t the new models or companies. It was that my whole approach to attending conferences has changed. Early on, it was easy to default to a few lazy assumptions: whatever big companies emphasize must be the future, whatever buzzword gets repeated on stage must be the consensus, and if a pr...

Your Biggest Mistake Isn’t Not Buying Tools, It’s Not Writing CLAUDE.mdA regional carrier’s CIO complained to me: “We’ve bought AI tools, deployed models, and even trained our people, but by the end of the first half of 2026, our delivery cycle hasn’t changed much. The head of the core systems team was even more blunt: ‘The AI-generated code works, but we have to rewrite it every time – it doesn’t understand our bank’s rules, it doesn’t understand the regulatory requirements, and it doesn’t k...

The Barrier to Building Apps Has Disappeared, But Not the Barrier to Accessing User DataRecently, a mid-platform manager from an e-commerce company has been asking me the same question: why can the business side build three internal tools using AI in just one week, while the IT development schedule is still pending for next quarter? What’s the holdup? Our answer is simple: the barrier to development has disappeared, but the barrier to accessing user data remains. This statement reflects two c...